


Death Magic

by BadFicOnly (truthinadvertising)



Series: Goretober [7]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Character Death, Dead Body, Drugs, Gen, Magic, Mentions of Cancer, Mushrooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29212305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truthinadvertising/pseuds/BadFicOnly
Summary: Witchcraft AUHedgewitch Kenma grows the necessary ingredients to create a potion to commune with Kuroo's spirit.Goretober Prompt: Fungi
Relationships: Kozume Kenma & Kuroo Tetsurou
Series: Goretober [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144754
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Death Magic

Kenma was a solitary being by nature. He had friends, of course, but most of the time he was content to be by himself with his plants. Especially nowadays, ever since Kurro had died. 

Kuroo was Kenma's greatest friend and he had been sick for a long time. Their little village had no traditional healer so what people couldn't deal with themselves they came to the Kozumes. Kenma's family had practiced witchcraft for generations, specifically, they were hedge witches, a branch of magic that specialized in herbal medicine and spiritual arts.

Kenma had known Kurroo since he was a child, they had played together when no one else would come near Kenma, scared as they were of his magic. Kuroo hadn't cared that Kenma's family, who didn't live in the village proper but off in the forest, was unusual and somewhat feared in the community until they were desperate that is. People were always cautious of magic until they had no other options. 

Kenma had loved Kuroo like a brother and he knew him better than anyone. He had noticed immediately when Kurro had started to feel unwell. Kurro had insisted he was fine, but he couldn't hide his condition forever. When he finally gave in and let Kenma examine him, after weeks of sleepless nights and drastic weight loss, Kenma had smelled the blood cancer in him. 

Kenma did everything he could for Kurro, almost desperately, trying more and more extreme spells and herbal cocktails to save his best friend. But in the end, there was nothing he could do. Kurro had died and Kenma was bereft. 

Weeks later, Kenma sat at his kitchen table with a cup of tea early one morning, with an array of herbs and mushrooms before him. He picked up a mushroom and brought it to his nose, no good, not mature enough. He went through this process with each of the plants before him, sorting them into piles based on usefulness. 

Kenma, overcome with grief, had decided he was going to try and commune with Kurro's spirit. He had tried the normal way he would go about doing it with no success. So he elected to try a spell that he had found in a dusty, decrepit journal he had found locked away in one of his mother's trunks he had never been allowed to look in while she was alive. 

The spell required the use of hallucinogenics to enter the spirit plane and the best way to find the spirit in question was, and this was why Kenma assumed his mother had locked this ancient journal away, to use drugs harvested from the flesh of the person or animal you were looking for. 

Using drugs in magic was something Kenma was familiar with, with this branch of medicinal magic so that didn't bother him, but the other part he had struggled to get over before deciding hearing Kuroo's voice again was worth anything unsavory he had to do to hear it. 

He pushed his tray of plants to the center of the table and finished his tea before setting out the front door and around to the back of his house. Under the big cedar tree was a body. Not just any body but Kuroo's body. He had been stripped, the mushroom spores needed his decaying flesh as the substrate to grow. 

Kenma kelt down in the dirt and gently petted Kuroo's black hair so that chunks of it wouldn't fall out. Kuroo's face was green, covered in mold and deterioration. Animals had gotten into the body and half of his face had been eaten away, his defleshed cheek showing his jaw bone and the rows of his teeth. It made Kenma sad, but he knew the body was no longer Kuroo, the only way to get to him was through his spirit. 

Moving away from his face, Kenma's fingers lightly prodded the cavity in his chest. His ribs had been broken open and a seam cut from his sternum down to his belly. In the cavity, among the dirt, and blight, and ruined tissue grew a copse of mushrooms. The mushrooms sprouted from everywhere from what surface dermis was left to the exposed muscle of his heart and lungs. Their brown bodies thick on his chest like flowers on a funerary corpse. 

Kenma tended his mushroom patch, weeding out ones that had died, picking out the ones whose time had come to be picked. He ignored the stench of death that hung over his workplace. He had become accustomed to it in the six weeks he had been cultivating the spores. Now was the correct time to pick them while they were in their peak and not before the spores died and the mushrooms stopped growing. 

Once Kenma had finished his work he said goodbye to Kuroo for now, his naked teeth a cruel imitation of his signature smirk. Kenma headed back inside with his basket of fungi. 

It would take a few more days for the ingredients to be ready for him to cast his spell. He went over the spell carefully as he began to prepare the mushrooms for drying. 

As he cut and cleaned the mushrooms he remembered the importance of the phase of the moon, the best time in the lunar cycle when the material world was closest to the spirit plane. 

As he sterilized the needle over a flame and strung it with kitchen string he remembered the appropriate measurements of the other herbs which would help control his trip to the other side, making sure he could find his own living body again. 

As he threaded the sliced and cleaned mushrooms onto the string he thought about the incantation that had been scribbled in the margins of the journal entry. Kenma and other hedgewitches rarely used incantations, their magic was more in their senses, but this time it would be necessary. 

And as he hung the strands up in a sunny window to dry he thought of exactly how big of a dose of Kurro's mushroom's he would need to find his beloved friend again. 

"Soon, just a few more days," he muttered to himself, running his finger over the hanging mushrooms making them dance under his touch. "I'll get you back, by the rot of your meat and muscle I swear I'll get you back." 


End file.
